ROWVA teens register 300 students to vote in primary

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ROWVA High School Seniors Annabeth Gibbons and Maddie Kalb set out to get area teens registered to vote beginning in December with the Teens Take Charge program they helped found.

The results are in and the seniors in conjunction with the Knox County Clerk’s office registered nearly 300 high school students in five Knox County Schools and one in Henry County.

County Clerk Scott Erickson tells WGIL that a lot of the program’s success was fueled by merely letting teens know that they could vote in the primary.

“A lot of the high school kids were surprised that they could vote,” Erickson says. “They didn’t know that as 17-year-olds as long as they turn 18 before the general they could vote, so, they were ecstatic. ”

Erickson also admits that Kalb and Gibbons might have been more effective than if he did it on his own.

“With the girls talking about it, it brought a sense of a peer to peer kind of thing,”Erickson says. “It really worked well and it really sunk in with the kids.”

Kalb and Gibbons will graduate this year but their may have spurned something that will outlast this election cycle.

“Galesburg High School has already talked about wanting to continue on with the project like this, so we’re going to talk to them and see if we can do a building block program where they can find peers in these schools to kind of start little ceilings in all of these different school districts,” Erickson adds.

Erickson is waiting on data to see how many of the teens registered showed up at the polls.

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